How to download a Google Drive url via curl or wget

Is there a way to download a publicly-viewable Google Drive url via curl or wget? For example, being able to do something like:

curl -O myfile.xls https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1Wb2NfKTQr_dLoFJH0GfM0cx-t4r07IVl

Note, I'm looking to do this on a publicly-viewable file without having to sign into my Google account (or have someone else sign into their account, etc.).

If helpful, the cors headers I have are:

 "kind": "drive#file",
 "id": "1Wb2NfKTQr_dLoFJH0GfM0cx-t4r07IVl",

Solution

How about this method? When the file is such large size, Google returns a code for downloading the file. You can download the file using the code. When such large file is downloaded using curl, you can see the code as follows.

<a id="uc-download-link" class="goog-inline-block jfk-button jfk-button-action" href="/uc?export=download&amp;confirm=ABCD&amp;id=### file ID ###">download</a>

The query with confirm=ABCD is important for downloading the file. This code is also included in the cookie. At the cookie, you can see it as follows.

#HttpOnly_.drive.google.com TRUE    /uc TRUE    #####   download_warning_#####  ABCD

In this case, "ABCD" is the code. In order to retrieve the code from the cookie and download the file, you can use the following script.

Sample script :

#!/bin/bash
fileid="### file id ###"
filename="MyFile.csv"
curl -c ./cookie -s -L "https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=${fileid}" > /dev/null
curl -Lb ./cookie "https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&confirm=`awk '/download/ {print $NF}' ./cookie`&id=${fileid}" -o ${filename}

If this was not useful for you, I'm sorry.

Updated at February 17, 2022

Recently, it seems that the specification of this flow has been changed. So I updated this answer. In order to download a publicly shared file of large size from Google Drive, you can use the following script.

#!/bin/bash
fileid="### file id ###"
filename="MyFile.csv"
html=`curl -c ./cookie -s -L "https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=${fileid}"`
curl -Lb ./cookie "https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&`echo ${html}|grep -Po '(confirm=[a-zA-Z0-9\-_]+)'`&id=${fileid}" -o ${filename}

In this case, the ID for downloading is retrieved from the HTML data as follows.

<form id="downloadForm" action="https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&amp;id={fileId}&amp;confirm={value for downloading}" method="post">

When you want to download a publicly shared file of small size from Google Drive, you can use the following command.
```
curl -L "https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=### fileId ###" -o sampleoutput.csv
```

Updated at January 21, 2024

From the following @excellproj 's comment,

January 2024 curl -L "https://drive.usercontent.google.com/download?id=${fileId}&export=download&confirm=t" -o "file.zip" working great for me. Small and large files

I checked this endpoint. By this, the following result is obtained. In the current stage, the following endpoint can be used.

https://drive.usercontent.google.com/download?id={fileId}&confirm=xxx

It seems that in the current stage, various values can be used to xxx of confirm=xxx. So, even confirm=xxx and confirm=yy and confirm=z can be used.

The sample curl command is as follows.

curl "https://drive.usercontent.google.com/download?id={fileId}&confirm=xxx" -o filename

And/or,

curl -L "https://drive.usercontent.google.com/download?id={fileId}&confirm=xxx" -o filename